Posts Tagged ‘News’

Administrators, mentors needed for Google Summer of Code

In the words of will.i.am, “great coders are today’s rock stars,” but unfortunately there are not enough of these rock stars in the world to fulfill the demand.

Since this week is the Hour of Code, it’s a good time emphasize the need for the Open Source Software community to participate in outreach programs.

Besides doing what you can to participate in this weeks Hour of Code, its important to point out the need to have administrators and mentors from openSUSE’s community for the annual Google Summer of Code.

Google Summer of Code, which openSUSE has participatied in for several years, offers post-secondary student developers a stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Students are matched with a mentoring organization like openSUSE and given projects to work on over a three-month period. Last year there were 1,300 students with 190 mentoring organizations that took part in the program. Administrators get the process started and mentors help future developers understand real-world software development scenarios.

Administrators start the GSOC process and submit proposals for the mentoring organization by filling out some forms. Administrators submit the application to Google between Feb. 9 and Feb. 20. Project ideas are discussed with potential mentoring organization and mentors are paired with students in the spring.

To participate in this project, visit our GSOC portal or learn more at GSOC.

NUREMBERG, Germany (5-Nov.-2014) – Many Linux user groups throughout Italy met at separate, but collectively themed events on Oct. 25 for Linux Day to promote the use of GNU/Linux and free software.
Alexjan Carraturo, a openSUSE advocate, used this year’s Linux Day, which is sponsored by the Italian Linux Society, to promote participation in the openSUSE Project in both Tuscany and Umbria.
“openSUSE offers something different and intriguing,” Carraturo said.
Not everyone appreciates the value of free software, Carraturo said. One of the greatest satisfactions with promoting free software is the look of surprise people have when they realize that they are not forced to choose only between Microsoft and Apple.
“The free software is an alternative that people need, but they don’t yet know they have,” he said. (more…)

With the existing company affiliations in the board (Pavol – Novell, Bryen – none, Rupert – openSLX) the restraint is that at most one of the additional elected persons can be affiliated with Novell and one with openSLX.

On Sunday the first openSUSE conference (osc09) finished in Nuernberg, Germany. Overall it was great success and brought people face to face together. Participants were motivated and enthusiastic and we’d like to just show some comments on twitter/blog:

“Folks! I’m hoooome! #oSC09 was a blast! More details to come BryenY”

“Back from the #opensuse conference #osc09, back to work. Had a great time”

We had overall around 225 persons from all over the world attending. For those who couldn’t make it to the conference we’ll try to publish all presentations and videos if available. A lot of people from Novell’s Nuernberg and Prague offices showed up -Â sometimes only for a few hours – which shows that Nuernberg was theÂ right location for this event.Â Novell VPs and Directors that showed up include Carlos Montero-Luque, Ralf Flaxa, Gerald Pfeifer and Roland Haidl.

The whole four days we had two tracks of talks and two tracks of ad-hoc conference sessions on a variety of topics incl. moblin, appliances, desktop, quality, community, toolchain and system, and legal. Some sessions to point out where:

team meetings of GNOME and KDE developers, incl. a common meeting

the governance sessions (see below)

Keynotes by Lenz Grimmer on “working in a virtual community” and Gianugo Rabellino on “Open Development in the trenches: a decade at the Apache Software Foundation”

Stefan Werden announcing that he’s taking over the openSUSE retail Box business

Thursday evening we had a great party at the Novell offices and Friday and Saturday night a local cinema was presenting the “Creative Common Film night”.

We were impressed by the many discussions that formed and the ad-hoc conference sessions set up and the many groups gathered in the hall ways and pretty productively covered a certain topic. We’d like also point out a night time session on Friday night (until 3:30am) where more than 10 people triaged through GNOME bugs for openSUSE (incl. checking whether they are still valid) and hacked on GNOME features like Bacon (banshee UI for Moblin) and Zeitgeist (GNOME 3.0).

GovernanceWe had two sessions on how governance in the project does work today and what needs to be changed. Currently most of the decisions are done by experts in their area, the open question is what kind of process is needed in case area experts cannot make a decision. We have decided to move forward in the following way: A small group will now discuss this further together with the board, create a first proposal for public comments and once we have a good proposal, the openSUSE members will vote on this change.

RPM SummitWe had an RPM summit which Florian Festi (upstream RPM developer emplyoed by Red Hat) joined. Goal was to work on RPM itself to unify RPM usage between openSUSE and Fedora – the end goal is that a valid spec file for openSUSE or SLE is also valid for Fedora/Red Hat and vice versa.

Software Freedom
Saturday we had a track in German as part of the world wide Software Freedom day which was targeted to people new to Linux. We had pretty many interesting and supporting conversation with some participants that came just for this day. Most interesting to AJ was an incident at the rather big local farmer market in the morning where a person said “Today I go to Software Freedom day”. And AJ recognized this person later that day at the conference.

Journalists & Media

Ulrike Beringer made it happen that 11 journalists attended the conference and had several interviews at the conference with Joe Brockmeier, Michael Meeks and Andreas Jaeger.

Comment from our PR agency was: “The feedback of the journalists was very positive, as you can see in the report some of them even published several articles at once. Hence from our PR perspective the event was a big success!” RadioTux interviewed various participants for podcasts of more than 90 minutes.

Thanks to Ulrike for setting this up!

Photos
If you like to see some photos, check either of these two galleries: